Congratulations Dr. Burman!

I am happy to share the news that my first doctoral student – Emil Burman – successfully defended his thesis yesterday, and can now introduce himself as Dr. Burman.

And in what a way he defended! During the three hour defense, he was asked all the hard questions from his opponent – Akos Kovács – who did an amazing job bringing out Emil’s vast and diverse knowledge of the field. In fact, the committee noted afterwards that it took more than one and a half hours of questioning before Emil had to admit “I don’t know the answer to that”.

Emil’s thesis, titled “Genetic Contributions to Invasion and Biofilm Disruption in a Microbial Model Community“, used the microbial model community THOR (1) to investigate community responses to environmental stress and microbial invasion. The thesis (2) consists of five papers, the first dealing with how temperature affects THOR (3), the second with how pathogenicity is related to competition ability in a community setting, the third about the genetic determinants of antibiotic susceptibility in Pseudomonas aeruginosa, the fourth about invasion with P. aeruginosa into THOR, and the last one is a proteomics study about one of the strongest hits in paper IV.

Emil has used a range of techniques, including traditional microbiological assays, transposon mutagenesis (INSeq), and proteomics, to identify genetic determinants of community stability and disruption. This has allowed him to explore how cooperative traits emerge and how pathogens like Pseudomonas aeruginosa interfere with community dynamics. His thesis can be found in an online version here.

References

1. Lozano GL, Bravo JI, Garavito Diago MF, Park HB, Hurley A, Peterson SB, Stabb EV, Crawford JM, Broderick NA, Handelsman J: Introducing THOR, a Model Microbiome for Genetic Dissection of Community Behavior. mBio, 10, 2, e02846-18 (2019). doi: 10.1128/mBio.02846-18
2. Burman E: Genetic Contributions to Invasion and Biofilm Disruption in a Microbial Model Community. PhD Thesis, University of Gothenburg (2025). https://gupea.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/87262
3. Burman E, Bengtsson-Palme J: Microbial community interactions are sensitive to small differences in temperature. Frontiers in Microbiology, 12, 672910 (2021). doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2021.672910